Many technologies are in place for communicating information. Information can be broadcast to a wide audience via existing television and radio stations, for example. An “emergency broadcast system” that employs existing television and radio infrastructure has been known for a long time. While this approach can be used to widely disseminate a generic message, for example a text message read by a live announcer, it is not easily customized for different recipients, and there is no “feedback” to indicate who actually received the message. Furthermore, all such broadcasts are public by design, so they cannot be used for controlled or secure communications.
Digital communications, for example via email or the Internet, have several advantages. First, they can be made relatively private, for example using known encryption technologies, and/or login and password procedures, but all of these require some pre-arrangements at the receiving end, for example establishing a “user account”. Such arrangements are not practical for widespread use when time is of the essence, as during a crisis or emergency such as a flood or military attack.
Digital communications also provide, in many cases, a convenient way to implement feedback or “closed loop” communications to ensure delivery. For example, modern email and network software ensure email delivery (or provide an error message to the sender). Email, however, requires that every recipient have an individual email user account, and that the user access that account to receive email. An urgent emergency message would be of no practical use if the intended recipient (or thousands of them) did not happen to check their email for new messages at the critical time.
For these and other reasons explained below, the need exists for improvements in the management of emergency information to ensure timely delivery of appropriate content to intended recipients, especially during an emergency when some channels of communication may be disrupted or overwhelmed by an extraordinary volume of message traffic. Also, it may also be beneficial to securely “pre-position” content in advance of a crisis or event, providing near-instantaneous availability from a local source.